FLORENCE BROADHURST wallpaper is associated with style mavens worldwide and she was the first person showcased when Sydney's Powerhouse Museum last year opened a permanent gallery to recognise important contributions to Australian culture and design. But her eye-popping, swinging 60s designs may soon also grace a brothel on one of the city's grimiest roads.
Somehow the setting seems fitting - not for any tawdry reason, but simply because of the designer's mysterious and outrageous life that resulted in a body of work enjoying a rebirth of interest internationally. Two recent works produced in Australia, where she was murdered in 1977 aged 78, should add to the appeal: a docudrama by Gillian Armstrong called Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst, and a book by Helen O'Neill entitled Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret and Extraordinary Lives (Hardie Grant Books, HK$360).
While others may have been drawn to Broadhurst's story by her work, O'Neill admits it was the other way around for her. 'She was an extraordinary woman who lived her life by lying, creating one character after another, and changing her appearance and her history,' she says. 'Plus there are all those fantastic designs, only a few of which, even today, are out on the market.' And then there's the case surrounding her brutal killing, which has never been solved.
Broadhurst died one Saturday afternoon in a horrific attack at her showroom in the Sydney suburb of Paddington. After bashing her head numerous times with a piece of wood picked up from her factory downstairs, the killer placed Broadhurst's body beside a toilet and shoved her head in the bowl. The murder was also baffling because little was stolen, apart from a couple of rings and some cash.
Broadhurst's shocking exit capped a risk-filled life. Having vowed 'to do great things' as a child, she sung her way out of not only her family home in rural Queensland but also Australia. By 25 she had renamed herself Bobby Broadhurst and toured Asia, including Hong Kong, eventually ending up in Shanghai, where, in 1926, she opened the Broadhurst Academy Incorporated School of the Arts on the corner of Nanking and Kiangse roads. Her stint teaching the daughters of well-off expatriates everything from dancing to elocution came to an end with the imminent arrival of civil war.
Broadhurst also reinvented herself as the couturier Madame Pellier during her 1930s sojourn in London, before returning to Australia, pretending to be English and speaking with an accent British-born journalist O'Neill describes as haughty and aristocratic. Her next adventure, as a painter, preceded the dovetailing of personal crises. 'Her long-term relationship had broken down, she needed money and she was pushing 60,' says O'Neill, explaining why Broadhurst decided on a career change so late in life, and, after declaring that Australia was afraid of colour, started producing wallpaper. 'It ended up being her defining venture.'
